So I was thrilled yesterday to get everything setup the way I needed so that I could connect my eSATA drive to my 4GB DC/SQL 2008 server so that I could back up my data and finally grow my system partition…
I had everything perfect, then I made a noob mistake. I grabbed the first loose adapter I could find that fit, plugged it in and powered everything on…
The drive light went on for a second and then off… strange…
I checked the drive, all was well. I checked the adapter… AC/AC current! damn!
Being the stubborn sort, I figured this was barely powered for 3 seconds I could get away with connecting it correctly and what do you know, the drive powered up correctly. Thing is, it causes my system to hang at the POST when it is connected…
I am sorry to say that I am aware of what the problem is, only because I have been down this road before…
The trick when this happens, is to cause the POST to complete and connect the drive immediately after so the OS can use it.
I did and as planned that worked… like many IT folks, I got busy doing something else and forgot the state I left everything in and let the system power up with the drive connected.
I came back many hours later, completely forgetting the drive connected to my system is unreliable at best and absent mindedly back up my entire data partition to it, move the swap file and reboot.
Because I am a cursed man, this one time when I would have needed it to, my system did not freeze at POST (thus serving as a reminder that I have a bad external drive connected) and booted successfully into windows further NOT reminding me of my external drive’s plight…
OK, so now I stopped all important services which have running code on my data partition and delete the data partition since it is backed up… right???
The system prompted me to boot which I did and once again, the system sneakily booted into windows…
Excellent, now I grew my system partition as planned and put the data partition back slightly smaller and busily started restoring my files…
My system slowed to an unbelievable crawl… then froze!
I force restarted it and guess what? It froze at POST….
Memories of my jogging pants being pulled down in gym class came flooding back, oh yeah and the fact all my data was now backed up on a partly cooked piece of hardware!
Thank god for the Best Buy’s and Future Shops of the world and their awesome exchange/return policies…
I normally buy small hardware items there despite higher prices explicitly for the exchange/return policy :).
So until Best Buy opens, I’ll busy myself restoring chunks of data until my system freezes and then reboot and try again! Fun times…
More to come!